In this project, Chiu attempts to portray the fluidity of history, minerals, and natural elements as an alternative method of aesthetic observation. Inspired by the 1819 voyage of the explorer Dumont d’Urville, this work ties together ideas of oceanic exploration, sea currents and cultural politics, through an assemblage of disparate objects and events. Tales of colonial seafaring are further overlaid with trace memories of the Venus de Milo sculpture and the 1960s Space Race. Shattered Romance is imagined by the artist as an adventure into the unknown, as well as an embodiment of a form of history where humans no longer occupy a privileged centre. Instead, this work proceeds by pursuing the inner energy
and creative potential of diverse materials, engaging them in dialogue, and seeking to embody them through the logic of their internal designs.

Shattered Romance’s interweaving of the history of human exploration and the activity of ocean current is manifested in the strange combination of a borrowed sculpture by Kan Tan (Wind from the Sea, 2006), a jade and meteorite carrack (a three- or four-masted ship), and a sculpture made of thermally-modified wood and metal. Altogether, the works restlessly oscillate between the historical and the natural, a silent dialogue between different times and spaces. The process of combining these elements has loosened the borders of what had previously been opposed: the artificial and the natural, life and death, desire and reality, the unknown and reason, the native and the foreign, the organic and the synthetic, the broken and the complete. How does art, in a time of catastrophic change, manage to reconstruct autonomy, perceived consciousness and order? This project aims to present an underlying route for writing a shattered romance.